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I think that concern over the climate on Earth has reached “too much of a healthy thing” levels. Climate change is almost certainly going to cause human and ec

I think that concern over the climate on Earth has reached “too much of a healthy thing” levels. Climate change is almost certainly going to cause human and economic disasters on a massive scale, but it’s not going to eradicate the human species or most likely even meaningfully set civilization back more than completely avoidable policy stuff. It’s probably going to be “bad world war” level bad, which is very bad but not fatal to the species. And perhaps more importantly, it’s like too late right? Even if we stopped burning all fossil fuels today we’re already in for a pretty massive chunk of the present forecasts I think? And the Mars colonization stuff just makes no sense from a species survival standpoint: an arbitrarily polluted Earth is vastly more hospitable than Mars. Detecting and altering the course of asteroids is dramatically, dramatically more feasible than a self-sufficient Mars, and if it’s a GRB rather than an asteroid you’re just screwed no matter what. Now if people want to colonize Mars because it’s awesome, I mean be my guest, but don’t sell it as asteroid insurance.

nostrademons 4y ago
Probably a bit worse than "bad world war". A lot of the people currently alive are alive because of relatively fragile technological developments (eg. the Green Revolution, global shipping, globalized finance) from the last 50-60 years. World population was 3B in 1960, now it's 8B. Take away fossil fuels and globalization and I'd expect many of these people to die. (Well, everybody's going to die, but die without leaving surviving descendants.) I'd expect world population to revert back to its pre-industrialization levels (~1.2B as of 1850), which implies a die-off of about 85% of people. It wouldn't necessarily be a sharp die-off, but just people having fewer surviving children as resources become more scarce, fertility declines, fewer offspring survive, and fewer of the surviving offspring choose to reproduce. It would also be very unevenly distributed, with some regions becoming basically uninhabited while others have only minor effects or even benefit. By contrast, WW2 killed off about 15% of the population in the worst-affected regions (Poland, Lithuania, the USSR) and only 0.32% in the U.S.
- benreesman 4y ago
  I hope I didn’t imply that it’s a minor thing, and if I did I regret it. Climate change (to the extent that our computer models of chaotic phenomena are directionally accurate which I think they are) is going to be devastating. I don’t think that it’s going to kill of 85% of people, because to your point it will happen over time: a failed harvest here, a flooded city there over decades or centuries. We will have the opportunity if we take it to adapt incrementally and help the most recently impacted incrementally. Now we might just leave the impacted for the wolves, and that’s a depressingly likely outcome, but we could choose something better. A lot of dystopian thought and fiction was premised on unbounded Malthusian catastrophe, and it isn’t playing out that way to my surprise and I think most people’s surprise. But we haven’t even scratched the surface of options that are available with current technology, one example would be widespread deployment of quite safe fission energy. It’s going to be bad, but how bad depends a lot on what we do.
  - palata 4y ago
    While I tend to agree with your points, I think that you underestimate the problem by limiting it to Climate Change. Climate Change hasn't started yet, and we are living a mass extinction. Remove all CO2 from the atmosphere today, and we are still in a mass extinction. Then comes the energy problem: we don't have any viable alternative to fossil fuels. Solar/Wind infrastructures are growing fast thanks to fossil fuels. And fossil fuels are not unlimited (peak conventional oil was 2008, peak oil may be now, peak LNG may be 2038). So we are slowly running out of time in terms of energy resources (given how much time it takes to build a nuclear plant). "Technology will help" ignores that technology brought us here, but also that technology takes time, and energy. Without the CO2 problem, nothing says that our society would not collapse because we can't replace fossil fuels.

nostrademons 4y ago

Probably a bit worse than "bad world war". A lot of the people currently alive are alive because of relatively fragile technological developments (eg. the Green Revolution, global shipping, globalized finance) from the last 50-60 years. World population was 3B in 1960, now it's 8B. Take away fossil fuels and globalization and I'd expect many of these people to die. (Well, everybody's going to die, but die without leaving surviving descendants.) I'd expect world population to revert back to its pre-industrialization levels (~1.2B as of 1850), which implies a die-off of about 85% of people. It wouldn't necessarily be a sharp die-off, but just people having fewer surviving children as resources become more scarce, fertility declines, fewer offspring survive, and fewer of the surviving offspring choose to reproduce. It would also be very unevenly distributed, with some regions becoming basically uninhabited while others have only minor effects or even benefit. By contrast, WW2 killed off about 15% of the population in the worst-affected regions (Poland, Lithuania, the USSR) and only 0.32% in the U.S.

benreesman 4y ago
I hope I didn’t imply that it’s a minor thing, and if I did I regret it. Climate change (to the extent that our computer models of chaotic phenomena are directionally accurate which I think they are) is going to be devastating. I don’t think that it’s going to kill of 85% of people, because to your point it will happen over time: a failed harvest here, a flooded city there over decades or centuries. We will have the opportunity if we take it to adapt incrementally and help the most recently impacted incrementally. Now we might just leave the impacted for the wolves, and that’s a depressingly likely outcome, but we could choose something better. A lot of dystopian thought and fiction was premised on unbounded Malthusian catastrophe, and it isn’t playing out that way to my surprise and I think most people’s surprise. But we haven’t even scratched the surface of options that are available with current technology, one example would be widespread deployment of quite safe fission energy. It’s going to be bad, but how bad depends a lot on what we do.
- palata 4y ago
  While I tend to agree with your points, I think that you underestimate the problem by limiting it to Climate Change. Climate Change hasn't started yet, and we are living a mass extinction. Remove all CO2 from the atmosphere today, and we are still in a mass extinction. Then comes the energy problem: we don't have any viable alternative to fossil fuels. Solar/Wind infrastructures are growing fast thanks to fossil fuels. And fossil fuels are not unlimited (peak conventional oil was 2008, peak oil may be now, peak LNG may be 2038). So we are slowly running out of time in terms of energy resources (given how much time it takes to build a nuclear plant). "Technology will help" ignores that technology brought us here, but also that technology takes time, and energy. Without the CO2 problem, nothing says that our society would not collapse because we can't replace fossil fuels.